Royalty; March 11 2026

Having a form of flesh and bone is rough. I’ve been stuck in a cycle of pain in which I sleep badly (because of the pain) and then I’m in pain all day (because I barely slept). I’m feeling down about my grades in one of my classes, too, which are a lot lower than I’d expect. I’m meeting with the prof to go over test answers and hopefully learn what I got wrong.

I do have a couple of new projects to talk about, though! One is not-as-new – it’s the horror/fantasy I started a couple of weeks back, which I expect to be a novel. I hope it’ll be a novel rather than novella, but I’ll have to finish the first draft to find out.

The other project is a TTRPG (which is tabletop role-playing game, if you’re not familiar). Once, several years ago, I ran a roleplay-based game in which an elite group of female fighters, called Princesses, fought a corrupting force that spilled over from a dark world into our own. The Princesses are also incredibly famous performers; their battles against the Corrupted are highly publicized and made into a primary form of entertainment, but they’re also expected to be singers, dancers, performers, painters… Any sort of incredibly skilled artist. They’re televised 24/7 and aim to reach peak fame in order to become a Queen.

And, well. There hasn’t been a Queen in a long, long time, because Princesses tend to die in battle. Or worse – get retired, which is a sinister fate all its own. No one really knows what happens to a retired Princess, and they all pray they never have to find out firsthand.

So I’m in the midst of transforming this into an actual game that can be played not just by myself and my friends. It’s going to take some time, especially since I want to research similar TTRPGs to figure out all the various mechanics I’ll need to develop. I could base it on an existing system, but to be honest, I kind of have an idea of how an independent system could work, so I’m finagling my vision into comprehensive rules.

If I do wind up making this work, I’ll probably try my hand at a Kickstarter, too. I’d love to have art to go with the basic story/world, but naturally, I’m not going to expect an artist to work for free.

Hopefully I’ll have more time to devote to these things next month! This one is shaping up to be a busy one. In a perfect world, it’ll stay this busy but I’ll have a better-working body. Fingers crossed.